What is Cloud Computing and Why Should You Care?

What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a computing model that lets you access software, server, and storage resources over the Internet, in a self-service manner. Instead of having to buy, install, maintain and manage these resources on your own computer or device, you access and use them through a Web browser. Sometimes you might need to download a small piece of client code (i.e., software you install on your PC), but we’d still categorize that as cloud computing, because, for the most part, the real horsepower is supplied from the cloud.

At this point, many of you may be asking, I still don’t get why they call this “cloud” computing — why not Internet computing? The answer is that techies have long used cloud icons to represent the data centers, technologies, infrastructure and services that comprise the Internet — and the metaphor has stuck.

You can perform just about any computing task in the cloud. It’s likely that you already use several cloud solutions. For example, software-as-a-service (SaaS) or on-demand business applications, such as salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks Online or Citrix GoToMeeting are cloud applications; you access them from your Web browser, but the software, processing power and storage reside in the cloud.

Free Web services — such as Google Gmail or Microsoft Hotmail, or FaceBook and Twitter, for that matter — are also examples of cloud computing. Likewise, if you use online backup solutions, you’re storing your files in the cloud. And many managed services providers supply services such as network and security monitoring over the Internet. Another example is Amazon.com, which sells access to CPU cycles and storage as a service of its cloud infrastructure.

Six Advantages and Benefits of Cloud Computing

Trade capital expense for variable expense

Instead of having to invest heavily in data centers and servers before you know how you’re going to use them, you can only pay when you consume computing resources, and only pay for how much you consume.

 

Benefit from massive economies of scale

By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower variable cost than you can get on your own. Because usage from hundreds of thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, providers such as Amazon Web Services can achieve higher economies of scale which translates into lower pay as you go prices.

 

Stop guessing capacity

Eliminate guessing on your infrastructure capacity needs. When you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. With cloud computing, these problems go away. You can access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as required with only a few minutes notice.

Increase speed and agility

In a cloud computing environment, new IT resources are only ever a click away, which means you reduce the time it takes to make those resources available to your developers from weeks to just minutes. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for the organization since the cost and time it takes to experiment and develop is significantly lower.

Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers

Focus on projects that differentiate your business, not the infrastructure. Cloud computing lets you focus on your own customers, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking and powering servers.

Go global in minutes

Easily deploy your application in multiple regions around the world with just a few clicks. This means you can provide lower latency and a better experience for your customers simply and at minimal cost.

 

What to Consider

Behind the scenes, cloud computing vendors have to do a lot of work to manage all of the infrastructure, technology, and people that make this possible. To provide services easily, flexibly and profitably to thousands or even millions of users, they invest heavily in hardware, virtualization technologies, networking infrastructure and automation capabilities (any one of which would need its own article to fully explain).

There are thousands of cloud computing vendors and solutions out there. But they are not all are created equal — and neither are your needs in any given solution area. Think about how critical a particular function is to your business? What would happen if you couldn’t access data or use the application for a period of time? For instance, a small business needs higher service levels for an accounting solution than a freelancer requires for expense tracking. Before moving beyond a trial service, consider your needs for reliability, security, performance and support — and then at how well a vendor can meet them.

Cloud computing providers should provide details about how they protect data and ensure regulatory compliance, and they should explain their policies to provide you with your data if you decide to terminate the service or if they go out of business. If you pay for a service, you should also get a service level agreement(SLA) from the cloud vendor. The SLA documents service requirements supply ongoing metrics to ensure these requirements are met, and provides remuneration should the vendor fail to deliver on the agreed metrics.